Is the future of gaming in the Social Media space?

Early this week, Electronic Arts officially announced its takeover of the most popular social media games company, Playfish, for an estimated US$300 million in cash and options.

Electronic Arts has been the dominant electronic gaming company in the world for several years, churning out blockbusters like Spore, The SIMs, and their sports franchised games like FIFA World Cup, NBA, etc….  Their strength has traditionally been in the packaged electronic games domain where their primary method of distribution has been to sell through retailers, packaged games for the PC, Mac, XBox, Playstation, etc…  Recently they have ventured into downloadable games which has reduced their distribution costs significantly.  In spite of their dominance in the industry, they announced substantial losses in 2009 which some analysts attributed to their absence in the traditional massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMPORG) and the growing social media gaming space.

The announcement of their purchase of Playfish, together with an announcement to cut close to 1,400 jobs, mainly in the R&D area, makes a bold statement of their intent.  The message is that their executives see the future of social media gaming….and that their current focus, which has served them well for almost a decade, is stale.

Playfish on the other hand, is at the forefront of gaming.  Titles such as Pet Society and Restaurant City which are primarily played on Facebook have millions of players who spend ten to twenty minutes a day with their online pet or restaurant.  Unlike the Tamagotchis, these pets need daily engagement to collect coins, visit friends and buy new things to decorate their houses.  The weekly addition of new items keep players engaged regularly.  What makes this such an easy game to play is that its essentially free.

But for those who think Playfish are as financially unviable as Twitter, think again.  When I met with their founders last year during a round of funding, they had already started to collect money from small purchases gamers made with real money to shorten the time it would take to establish their pet.  This amount could range in real cash, from $9.99 to $39.99 but allows you to use the virtual coins across all Playfish gaming platforms.  Such has been the success of this model that it is understood that Playfish did not touch the $20 million raised in their previous round of funding, achieving profitability within the 2 years since its founding.

Is this then the future of gaming (and by future, we can only talk about the next five years)?  Playfish is not the only fish in this pond.  Popular Facebook games such as Mafia Wars, Texas Hold’em Poker, Farmville and Yoville from Zynga, make them another attractive takeover target.  It took Farmville two months to get 11 million users.  Compare this to the 11.5 million users of the most popular MMPORG game, World of Warcraft from Blizzard.

So what are the advantages of running games on a social media platform?

1)  Huge base of members to reach out to.  Bear in mind that these members log in regularly to use platforms such as Facebook and MySpace for other things, so are more likely to log into a game to check or update their character’s status.

2)  The platform itself can channel reminders to members through their interface.  Members need not log into the game daily as any updates or notifications are listed on the main page of the platform itself.  The need to log into a game daily can quickly grow stale, but the reminders ensure members stay engaged with the game.

3)  Social media gamers tend to like a mix of games.  Games to distract the mind such as Bejeweled are popular, but do not pull gamers to play frequently through regular changes in their concept.  Playfish’s Word Challenge, Geo Challenge and Who Has the Biggest Brain, fall into this category.  The real winners are those that embed some aspect of MMPORG concepts.  Games such as Pet Society, Mafia Wars, Restaurant City, etc….all encourage interaction with other members, collection of credits, and the redemption of credits to acquire new items and go up levels.

4)  I blogged a few months back about Facebook potentially becoming one of the biggest payment platforms in the world.  Gaming is one of the areas which Facebook could facilitate the conversion of real cash into the online credits.  Few social media gamers (SMGs) are willing to fork out big sums of money to play these games, but are more willing to pay small sums of money to acquire special items or to shortcut the path to the next level.  At this time, Playfish and Zynga need to work out their own payment methodologies with third parties, but if Facebook as an example, can facilitate this for all the applications embedded within their platform, it would make it easier for members to pay.  As it is, these “small” sums have made Playfish profitable.  The idea of making a small amount from many is somewhat akin to Walmart’s concept, and we all know how successful that has been.  $1 from 10 million players is going to make you more than $100 from 1,000 players.

There are however, many challenges before SMG can be considered the future of gaming.  For one, fequent tweaking and upgrading of the concept means daily challenges to come up with new ideas to expand the virtual world created.  There is also the challenge of technological constraints as the number of players increase, most of whom will never generate a dime of income for you.

The one income stream that I haven’t really seen exploited sufficiently in SMGs is the idea of brand placement.  Its done frequently in movies now (Starbucks being the most blatant).  But, I have yet to see a Starbucks Cafe in Pet Society or a McDonalds in Mafia Wars.  These brands could not only sponsor a virtual outlet in some social media game, but also hold competitions, etc…which would effectively reach out to a massive online population at a very low cost per impression.  Whatever it may be, I think SMG is not just the future of gaming, but also the future of advertising.

Tong Hsien-Hui

Why CEOs Should Not Get “Into” Social Media

One of the big questions or issues in Social Media is whether CEOs should involve themselves in the social media space.  Certainly, there are many CEOs who are immersed deeply in the social media environment, twittering, facebooking, etc…, however, these are mainly CEO of relatively modest sized companies.  The CEOs of major companies prefer to stay out of the social media limelight…unless they are in that line of business.

Many blogs, articles, commentary and opinion pieces have been written on this topic.  Since most of these pieces have been written by people with an interest (either financial or otherwise) in social media, the inevitable conclusion is that these big time CEOs are doing their companies a dis-favour by not engaging their “customers” and stakeholders through the various social media streams.  I beg to differ for the following reasons:

–  The average CEO of a Fortune 100 company has thousands upon thousands of stakeholders…its impossible to engage with everyone at a personal level without passing on the communication to a team.  This is what the current “Community Managers” are already doing for the company so why create another channel which everyone will take to imply gets them more attention.  It dilutes attention from the corporate social media engagement without really affording the close personal touch needed.

–  The rules of Corporate Governance apply to all CEOs, so anyone expecting the inside scoop on Twitter or Facebook is going to be disappointed.

–  Since its unlikely a CEO would put down his/her personal opinion of various staff, customers, etc…what does that leave you in terms of content?

–  What would be the benefits to a “plugged in” CEO?  A closer relationship with the customer?  Building more PR sympathy?  Actually, as any social media specialist worth their salt will tell you, no one will universally like you online, and the opinion trends can swing in seconds from positive to negative.

 

So given that the actual benefits are almost impossible to define, the potential pitfalls are many, the effort is huge, the status quo is comfortable, why on earth would any CEO of a Fortune 100 company even consider building their social media presence online (to say nothing of the fact that these CEOs change more frequently now too!)?

 

Facebook and Privacy. Why Don’t People Get it?

I gave a talk recently on Facebook. The talk was meant as an introduction to the concept of Facebook and how it could be used to build communities and enable interaction. While the age of the attendees ranged from mid twenties to seventies, the predominant demographic was those aged fifty and above. This wasn’t a big surprise as the technological revolution has left a number of these people in its wake and even younger ones (myself included) have to constantly keep up with whats new in the realm of technology.

What surprised me most was that quite a number of those attending the talk had already registered Facebook accounts. In fact the majority had an account but did not use it. Their biggest worry was not how to use it (although I hope I was able to show them something new in the talk), but about the possibility of losing or having their identity stolen. It is unfair to deride them for being luddites simply because they have a valid concern which in fact few younger members have. As you get older, you have more to lose than a teenager whose “street cred” only extends as far as the end of the street.

What a lot of them failed to realize is that Facebook offers one of the most customizable privacy settings of any social media platform I have ever used (including MySpace, Ortuk, QQ, Socialtrak, Drupal, etc…). The ability to exclude groups of your “friends” as well as individual friends from viewing parts or all of your profile is what I think is an important function within Facebook. The process I suggested they adopt was the following:

– Don’t put anything on your profile that you don’t want others to see. For instance, I wouldn’t ever consider putting my credit card number or my actual address on Facebook, even if I have the option to block it out.

– Group your friends based on how close you are to them. I don’t mind my best friends seeing everything on my profile and photo album. I have a few FB “friends” solely for the purpose of the FB games I play. These I don’t give any access to anything other than the most basic information about myself.

– Go to Settings -> Privacy in your Facebook account and “customize” access for each of the logical segments of information categorized.

I understand that Facebook will shortly be changing the Privacy Settings page to make it more user friendly. Hopefully this will not remove the granularity of customization that we are now used to.

On the flip side of the equation, I have seen teenagers with FB profiles that are open to everyone and anyone. Basically even without being a friend, you can see everything they have available. This might be a concern in terms of physical and online safety. I think most of them only realize how dangerous this can be when their parents view their profiles….and comment! One of the most amusing sites I have visited recently is http://myparentsjoinedfacebook.com which posts screen captures of parents interacting with their children on Facebook. You wouldn’t believe how fast these kids figured out the Privacy settings after that!

Tong Hsien-Hui

I still don’t like Twitter

   So I’ve been using Twitter since like forever.  I jumped on the bandwagon early last year when most people had never even heard of Twitter, and found it a novel way of communicating in bites (bytes) with followers.  Those were the days of having 20 close friends following you and you following them.  Then came the wave late last year as Twitter became the “in” social media platform, and everyone was expected to have thousands of followers to show you had “presence” online.  I never bit…but I have to admit I accepted a number of followers that I did not know or who did not really know me.

 

Now my tweetspace is a mess.  I still monitor interesting stuff that my friends tweet about, but if I were to see my tweet list, I have an eclectic mix of sales pitches, religious sayings, tweets in foreign languages and the ubiquitous tweeter who tells you every damn thing that goes on in his/her life.  I could really do without those “I tweeting while trying…God I’m constipated” tweets first thing in the morning.

 

So while lots of people find it “amazing” and “the next big social media thing”, I find minimal value in it.  Thats not to say I don’t think it serves some purpose.  After all, telcos could never figure out what the big deal about SMS was about…before it became a major revenue stream.  So Twitters somewhat similar.  Its a one to many web based SMS system that seems to work for some reason.  

 

If you were to ask me what a really useful service is, I would say a web based version of traditional SMS.  Sending free tweets to specific people, having the ability to send tweets to specific groups,  etc….but hey, isn’t that what Skype and Messenger are???

To Facebook or not to Facebook?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working with more senior members of our community on a variety of ways in which lives can be enriched even after retirement.  It has to be stated first that these members, while not at the very top of Abraham Maslow’s heirarchy of needs, are certainly not at the bottom either.  So financial security is a given.  

 

Their biggest issue is with how to enrich their otherwise drab and routine lives which now tend to centre around looking after their grandchildren.  One of the reasons why I got involved is because technology and more specifically social media is probably more suited to this segment of the population than any other.  While the younger set use social media for convenience, issues of physical mobility are significant for our more elderly citizens and social media platforms can help facilitate their continued social interactions.

 

However, while the benefits of an engagement on this platform is intuitive to people familiar with it, it is not always so for others.  I realized after engaging this group that the following fears are prevalent:

–  Fear of technology, and more specifically how to use the computer or the internet.  This fear centres around how to navigate what for us is a familiar landscape but for others, an almost alien environment.

–  Physically being unable to read from the screen comfortably.

–  Fear of their personal information being stolen

–  Fear of new things.  

 

These fears are not without foundation.  I am just grateful that they were open enough with me to be candid.  The benefits I like to highlight are:

–  Maintain contact with their current circle of friends and even reach out to other friends who might have been forgotten with the passage of time.

–  Keep everyone updated on their current activities, or be incentivized to be more active to enrich their profile

–  Relate to their children through this medium.

–  Join or lead interest groups that are important to them.

To address the fears they have listed, I proposed the following activities:

–  A series of training courses to bring them from absolute beginners to familiarity with the philosophy and context of social media platforms

–  A manual on how to use large fonts for their computer.  If this is insufficient, it is possible to use the mobile version of Facebook on your computer…with a little bit of work.  The mobile version is very clear…especially when expanded to the PC screen.

–  Part of the training should include a section on privacy and parameters on what to or what not to put on the web.

–  The hardest part is the changing of the mindset.  But if someone is willing to turn up at your course, it shows a willingness to at least consider the options

 

 

Tong Hsien-Hui

MySpace doesn’t know what they are doing

As anyone who follows developments in social media, even on the periphery, know, MySpace is losing the platform battle to Facebook.  Late last year, Facebook overtook MySpace as the largest social media site in the world and while Facebook has continued to grow, MySpace has more or less stood still.  

 

To compete effectively, MySpace had to so something radical or accept their new position as number two to Facebook…and given the growing popularity of Twitter, maybe even number three.  One of the reasons Facebook has been able to attract so many new members has been their focus on adding new languages to their traditional english-based profile.  Members can choose from a fairly comprehensive list of languages in which to navigate their social interactions with other members.  This is a powerful tool as one of the reasons for the highly fragmented nature of social media has been the inability of some popular sites to localize their offering.

 

It makes sense of MySpace to also quickly add this functionality in their offering which they did recently.  However, there is where the similarity with Facebook ends.  Facebook, in their localization efforts, kept the philosophy of letting their members choose how they want to see their site.  If they were existing members, they would initially see their site in english and were offered the option of changing it to whatever language was suitable for them in the Account Settings.  If they were new members, they could opt for a change in language with the little icon at the bottom left of the sign up screen which would convert the screen to the language desired.  This is a logical and fairly seamless way of giving your members options.

 

MySpace on the other hand, perhaps being now part of a large corporate entity, decided that they knew better than anyone else, especially their members, what language their members should be using.  So in their latest effort, they automatically converted pages from certain countries to what they THINK is the native language without bothering to ask if thats what their members wanted.  So on a given day, a member would try to sign into their account and find that everything has been converted into a language some of them don’t even speak.  

 

I’m not sure what is worse.  The assumption that they at MySpace know better than their members what they want, or that what they know is so obviously wrong.  I will give you the example of my country of residence, Singapore.  Singapore is a country in South East Asia and although the population demographics is about 70% Chinese, there is a significant Malay and Indian population as well.  With this diversity, the medium of communication has always been English and not Chinese (simplified or othewise).  Its not unheard of for Chinese Singaporeans not to be able to read Chinese.  MySpace on the other hand, thinking that since Singapore is in Asia and that everyone in Asia speaks Chinese, set traditional Chinese as the default language option.  In doing so, they made two mistakes.  One, that all Singaporeans speak and read Chinese.  The second is that traditional Chinese is used in Singapore.  In truth, traditional Chinese is used in only two territories:  Hong Kong and Taiwan.  Mainland China uses simplified Chinese as do most other countries.

 

With the sign-in page showing everything in a Chinese dialect, its been difficult for users to convert their pages back to English because they can’t even find out where to make the change.  In social media, if the platform is hard to use, no one will use it.  Such has been the case with a number of my friends who have stopped using MySpace wholesale and decided to build a new profile on Facebook.  The barriers to “churn” are extremely low.

 

If MySpace think that this latest initiative will help them take on QZone in China, then I think they are sadly mistaken.  They also misunderstand the cultural differences between social media users in China and in the US.  This latest foolishness just helped to alienate some existing, loyal members.  They don’t stand a chance against Facebook.

 

Tong Hsien-Hui

Can Facebook possibly make money?

Thats really the billion dollar question.  With 200 million users worldwide and growing, Facebook zipped past MySpace as the world’s largest social media networking platform at the end of 2008 in terms of number of users.  As they expand their repertoire to include foreign languages, the potential for membership growth increases day to day.

 

However, what venture capitalists, investment bankers and investors want to know, is how Facebook is actually going to monetize their huge membership base.  According to calculations done by independent auditing firms, Facebook makes less in advertising per member than MySpace does, and as their costs increase with every new member and new feature provided, this can only be detrimental to Facebook.  The traditionalists have put forward their views on how Facebook should do it:

 

1 – Advertising.  Currently it actually costs less to target a clearly defined segment rather than a more nebulous one.  For instance, targeting male graduates from Illinois is actually cheaper per member than to target male graduates in the whole United States.  From the marketing perspective, this is ideal as most campaigns have a very tight focus anyway so this is good for companies advertising on Facebook….its not so good for Facebook.

2 – Paying Membership Tiers.  Currently the full suite of Facebook services are free.  There is a possibility of adding a paying tier of members similar to what Twitter is trying to impose.  

3 – Revenue from Apps.  Facebook does receive a small sum for every application that is developed for deployment on their platform.  However, this is a small percentage of their total revenue which in itself is nothing much to shout about.

4 – Revenue from Apps transactions.  Again, Facebook receives a small commission every time some one pays for buying a virtual product from one of the applications.  

5 – Facebook Connect.  This recently launched application allows people to use their Facebook profile AND their Facebook contacts to be automatically uploaded to an independent site which has this widget embedded in their sign up page.  What makes this interesting is that a person doesn’t just join the new site, but brings his/her whole community along with them.  It is an evolution from the previously maligned Beacon initiative.  More insidious but probably the most effective tool in the current Facebook repertoire.

It is my belief that there are fundamental weaknesses in the traditional models being considered or being used by Facebook.  I understand from an interview done last year that Facebook intends to remain relatively hands off with regards to the way their current members are using Facebook and that they intend to make money from a variety of business models so as to ensure the integrity of the whole.  However, while their strategy appears solid, their execution sometimes leaves much to be desired.  

–  Advertising.  Social Media was, for marketers, supposed to be the next step after data mining and campaign management.  The basic tenets of data mining is to maximize the returns from ever more targeted markets.  Facebook is actually incentivizing marketers to go after the whole community again instead of restricting their ads to those who are more likely to respond to those ads.  By forcing marketers to go after the whole community they are not only doing a disservice to their clients but also to themselves as the community might react negatively to the irrelevant ad placements.

–  Paying membership.  From whatever research has been undertaken on this topic, it is clear that most members would consider only paying for membership that removed ads from their page.  This in turn would impact Facebook’s advertising revenue, so its not an easy option to consider.  I think Facebook can only seriously offer paying options for new features.  If they start to block off features from their site to only paying members, they may soon find no members left as people will start to switch and soon even paying members will leave because their communities are depleted.

–  Revenue from Apps.  I believe that a service like PayPal would be a very good fit for Facebook.  If they can provide a small range of financial services like escrow services, transmitting money, enabling members who do not have a credit card to pay for services or products on their site,…..then I think a lot of companies will see Facebook as a good platform to offer their e-commerce services.

Of the few options available, I seriously think that if Facebook can offer financial services, they would have a real winner on their hands, both from the membership as well as the profit perspective.  The alternative for them if they are unable to work out a solution would really be to sell themselves off to a Google or Microsoft.  I think Google would be a better fit in terms of complementary services and at the same time Google can integrate their Ortuk platform with them as well.

 

Tong Hsien-Hui

Future of Social Media

In nearly every one of the talks I have given over the last few months, my corporate clients will inevitably ask me about what my prediction of the future of social media will be.  I expect they want to hear about how social media will take over the world and all their customers will be plugged into the social media world.  I have had a lot of time to think about this matter and have seen how the social media landscape has changed over the last few years.  So here is my take….no punches pulled:

 

–  There is no money to be made in social media inspite of what so-called gurus talk about potential business models for Twitter or Facebook.  By money I mean profit after expenses.  The growth of Twitter and Facebook mean that they are always adding new machines and technology to keep up with their every growing but never paying customers.  Sure they make “some” money in different ways, but the truth is, the equation:  Cost > Income will lead to a situation where someone needs to pick up the tab for the balance.

–  The reason why no one wants to pay is because the value of the social connection isn’t high enough to justify forking money over.  Seriously, how many people out there (excluding companies) would want to pay for their Facebook account?  Even if they did, if most of their connections gave up their accounts they would soon give theirs up too.  Twitter is even worse…how much will you pay to receive bite sized spam?

–  Are there any other ways in which these sites can make money?  Sure, but none of them have figured it out yet.  As a consultant, I often tell clients to focus on the “social” aspect of social media…..that doesn’t mean folks at Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc….do too…..  One of the reasons why Google was so successful was because they had the technology to keep their expenses extremely low inspite of an exponential growth in their hit rate.  They used technology to stitch together cheap servers to form massive farms that kept their business growing.  Facebook is buying expensive servers as their clientele increases……with no appreciable increase in revenue….

–  Social Media is always about the next big thing…..  In the 1990’s people forget that one of the earliest social media sites was SixDegrees (now part of Vignette), then there was MySpace, now there is Facebook, tomorrow something else….Social Media is evolutionary and we are always on the lookout for the next big thing.  Customer loyalty is practically nil and the barriers to switching is only how long it will take to get your existing network up and running on a new platform as long as it has better features, made even easier today with features like Facebook Connect.

 

I predict in the next five years, a wave of consolidation in the Social Media space.  As with MySpace, I doubt that Facebook and Twitter can continue as independent entities.  I’m not very positive with Twitter.  I really fail to see how much value can be derived from an internet sms service.  Maybe if Microsoft were to add it to their Windows Live suite it might make some sense.  Facebook on the other hand would be best served by being part of Google.  It would be an ideal match technologically.  Either that or Facebook somehow find a way to start a Paypal like service and make use of their platform for e-trading.

 

Having lived through the internet explosion and now seeing the same foolish valuations placed on Social Media sites, its not hard to use historical references to infer what the market may look like in five to ten years.  To those who think I am excessively negative, I just hope that they are right……

 

Tong Hsien-Hui

Further changes to Facebook

So Facebook finally acknowledged that the changes made earlier were ill considered and have issued a list of “improvements” to the previous update that most annoyed users.  Key for me will be additional functionality so that you can customize the feed from applications used by your friends.  Currently whatever application used by your friend is fully described in your newsfeed which causes feeds from other friends to be pushed down the list and sometimes missed.

 

The workaround that Facebook proposed to my criticism of the above problem was to use the friend filter on the left part of the screen.  This filter function will be further enhanced so that it will be easier for you to group your friends and even prioritize the feed.  Other improvements will be a more real-time feed which is more similar to that offered by Twitter.  They are also working to move important updates like friend requests and invites to a more prominent location on the screen.  We were so used to having it on the top right that some of us didn’t realize it had moved to a location in the top center of the page.  I expect it will move back to the top right.

 

So things are back to normal in the Facebook world or as normal as could be expected.  I’m sincerely grateful that Facebook has heard our concerns and taken the trouble to make the necessary amendments to keep all parties happy.  Some commentators have noted that this report was issued by Christopher Cox (Director of Product) instead of Mark Z and tried to read some insidious politics behind it.  In truth, as Director of Product, these changes and associated feedback should be in the area of responsibility of Mr Cox.  Mark as CEO should realize that he is responsible for shareholder returns and profitability and focus on that instead.  Hopefully he has realized that now.

 

Tong Hsien-Hui

Why I dislike the new Facebook format

Its been about a week since the new format of Facebook was rolled out to me.  In that time I went from hating it to accepting it then back to hating it.  As social media is an important part of my job, I trawled the world wide web for what others thought about it.

 

The preliminary results were not surprising.  As with anything new, I didn’t read many complimentary comments on the new format.  A number of these could be attributed to resistance to change which, after time, would turn into grudging acceptance then maybe into liking.  There are of course different categories of communities on Facebook.  The bulk of them are purely social in nature.  However, there are also businesses on Facebook and application developers.  With the various interests involved, it is not surprising that their take on the new format varied as well.

 

From the social perspective, there are both improvements and failures.  The bigger fonts and space allocated for your friends’ update caters for the new and quickly growing membership of older people on Facebook.  Where previously a small one or two liner pegged next to your friends’ names would tell you what they were doing, its now a significant slot allocated for each update.  There is also more information regarding the update as well.  Furthermore, status updates can be independent of you to better reflect news information rather than your information.  This “streaming” of information updates is the same as what Twitter provides.  

 

Kudos have also been given to the more sophisticated filters on the left side of the screen where you can view updates either as a whole or by “friend list”.  If you have segmented your friends into lists, you can easily view just their updates by clicking on the list name at the left.    There is also a “Highlights” column on the right which shows what games, groups, etc…your friends are participating in (although you need to click on the sub icons in the column to find out which friends specifically).  The problem with this Highlights column is that advertising is mixed in with the actual updates (usually at the top) without significant assessment of its suitability.  I have seen an ad for American Girls – Temp12 in the highlights column in the Facebook page of a 12 year old girl.

 

When it comes to weaknesses though, there are a whole bunch now.  For one thing, most Facebookers I know are not that interested to find out the details of what their friends are doing.  Sure, they want to know what status update their friends are providing, but while knowing that their friends took a quiz on their mental age, they don’t want to know or care that the result was their friend has a mental age of 100.  If they were indeed curious they would click on their friends’ profile.   Furthermore, the larger font and space allocation reduces the number of updates they can see at a single glance.  Where previously it was easy to view most of the updates on a single page, they now have to scroll down to see all.  Given the nature of social media, most won’t bother, losing possibly interesting information.  It also becomes an issue of the domination of the frequent posters as with Twitter.  Those that post frequently can often push everyone else off your front page.  Previously the constraint of having 3-4 updates per person meant you could see more of what everyone was doing.

 

Of more irritation is the fact you can no longer selectively determine the updates you want to receive.  Facebook now has an all or nothing policy.  If for instance, you don’t want to see what games friend A is playing but still want to see his updates, it is no longer possible.  In the previous version, Facebook allowed you to select what you want to see and what you don’t.  Now, if you click on the right side of the update you can only choose to remove that person totally from your updates.  This actually is the biggest grouse I hear.  Its a big problem for those with both large and small groups of friends.  Another related issue is that those applications you blocked can still post to your newsfeed.

 

Most companies that actively update their Facebook groups like the new format.  In the same way greater exposure to the media prospectively gives you greater mind share, groups that update frequently with video, pictures, discussions, etc….repeatedly bombard their fans’ facebook homepages.  If for instance, you were a fan of Mashable, you would find that in the course of one day, you might find one third of your homepage taken up with their updates.  While this is contrary to the principles and etiquette of social media, it speaks to the old school marketers who are always looking for presence over interaction.  I expect Facebook signs up a lot more advertising with their new format.

 

I admit that I am biased against the new format.  I dislike it for the reasons given above, basically the lack of control I have over what I want to see.  I am also concerned that Facebook is blindly following the Twitter model without understanding why, inspite of all their “improvements”, Facebook can never be Twitter.  In simple terms, Facebook is a social media platform where each user has his/her own identity and community.  Twitter, for want of a better term, is an opt-in individual spamming platform.  You don’t mind linking up with people you don’t know because you don’t build a personalized profile anyway.  Thats why celebrities, politicians, religious leaders, etc….have no problem having you follow them on Twitter and vice versa, whereas they wouldn’t dream of accepting your friend request on Facebook.  So good luck to Facebook.  If things get worse, users will vote with their fingers and move to another platform.  With barriers to entry falling, you can even create your own social media platform free with Drupal!

 

Tong Hsien-Hui